219 PERCENT OF THE BIOMASS TARGET

 

In recent years, no fishery management issue on the East Coast has been more controversial than that of governing the recreational black sea bass fishery.

About eighteen months ago, I wrote a piece in which I described the effort as “managing the unmanageable,” given the peculiarities of the species’ life history; an increasing black sea bass population; unpredictable angling behavior; widespread illegal harvest, particularly among the for-hire fleet; and a regional management system that, instead of harmonizing nearby states’ regulations, actually creates severe inequalities between neighboring states.

The situation wasn’t made any better by a stock assessment that, although a notable improvement on the previous effort, still generated a strong retrospective pattern that overestimated fishing mortality and underestimated spawning stock biomass in the northern part of the stock’s range, while doing the opposite in the lower mid-Atlantic region.  

At the August 14 joint meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Management Board, Dr. Jon Hare, a biologist at the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center, noted that in trying to correct for the retrospective pattern’s underestimate of spawning stock biomass, managers probably went too far in the other direction, and ended up setting the biomass estimate higher than it should have been.

Perhaps as a result of such overestimation, the Black Sea Bass Operational Assessment for 2021, used to set the Acceptable Biological Catch and Annual Catch Limits for the 2022, 2023, and 2024 seasons, estimated spawning stock biomass to be 30,774 metric tons, “about 2.2 times the updated biomass target reference point.”

The funny thing is, while everyone was willing to accept the Operational Assessment’s estimate of spawning stock biomass, the rest of the science was roundly rejected, even though all of the data is very closely interrelated.

For example, at the December 2022 joint meeting of the Council and Management Board, the data indicated that recreational black sea bass landings had to be reduced by ten percent.  When New York’s Marine Resources Advisory Panel met the following month to consider ways to achieve such reduction, all of the recreational representatives and all of the recreational industry members in the audience were more than willing to agree with the Operational Assessment’s findings that the spawning stock biomass was high, but almost all of them also questioned the rest of the data, particularly the estimates of recreational landings derived from the Marine Recreational Information Program.

Thus, the bulletin reporting events at the meeting noted that one MRAC member

“said we have an overabundance of stock, which the chart shows, yet once you add the MRIP numbers you come out with a 2-year harvest that is way over the numbers [for the recreational harvest limit].  We need to go forward using biomass indexes and not MRIP numbers—they distort the numbers for every fishery.”

Others made similar comments at the same meeting, and at a follow-up discussion held in March.

What such commenters failed to understand is that it is impossible to isolate the spawning stock biomass estimate from the MRIP data, as the MRIP estimates are used, along with other data, to calculate the estimate of SSB.  

At the August 14 joint meeting, Dr. Paul Rago, the chairman of the Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee, noted that the MRIP estimates have a “huge” influence on the estimate of spawning stock biomass.  Lower estimates or recreational catch would lead to a lower estimate of SSB, just as a higher estimate of recreational catch would cause the estimate of spawning stock biomass to grow larger.

Thus, it is not possible, as the one MRAC member suggested, to use “biomass indexes and not MRIP numbers,” for the MRIP numbers are one of the most important drivers of the biomass estimate.  The data contained in the stock assessment represent an integrated whole; one cannot merely pick and choose, using the numbers that support a particular argument while rejecting the rest as invalid. 

Yet that is exactly what many people do, and that trend only seems to be getting worse.

In November 2023, the Northeast Fisheries Science Center released its new Report of the Black Sea Bass (Centropristis striata) Research Track Stock Assessment Working Group, which took a novel approach to assessing the black sea bass stock.  The new research track assessment employed a model that introduced additional variables not included in the previous assessment, fit the data much better, and largely eliminated the retrospective pattern.  In doing so, it established a new methodology that would be used in subsequent management track assessments which, as their description suggests, are used to set annual management measures.

The first management track assessment employing the new methodology was released in the summer of 2024, and its findings were significantly different from those of the operational assessment released three years before.

The management track assessment’s estimate of spawning stock biomass was 25,572 metric tons, about 20 percent less than the estimate in the operational assessment.  Its estimates of maximum sustainable yield and target spawning stock biomass were more than 20 percent lower, too.  Thus, it should not have been surprising that, when the management track assessment was reviewed by the Scientific and Statistical Committee, that committee found it to represent the best scientific information available, and recommended that the Council reduce the Acceptable Biological Catch by 20 percent, a reduction in line with the reduced biomass estimate.

But it seemed that just about no one—not the Advisory Panel, not the Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Monitoring Committee, and certainly not the Management Board—wanted to take the Scientific and Statistical Committee’s advice; the changed estimates of spawning stock biomass, maximum sustainable yield, etc. didn’t seem to get their attention at all.

Only one statement from the management track assessment seemed to stick in everyone’s mind:

“Spawning stock biomass (SSB) in 2023 was estimated to be 24,572 (mt) which is 219% of the biomass target.  [emphasis added]”

People fixated on that “219%,” even if the rest of the assessment's estimates were largely ignored.

No one even seemed to consider the fact that the management track assessment’s “219% of the biomass target” was about 20 percent lower than the operational assessment’s “2.2 times the updated biomass target reference point,” due to the big reduction in the biomass target.  All they heard was “219%,” and they wielded that number as a shibboleth in their efforts to ward off any further restrictions on landings.

The Advisory Panel was certainly focused on that one number to the exclusion of everything else; the summary of the August 5 Panel meeting began,

“Advisors were very frustrated with the 20% decline in the 2023 black sea bass acceptable biological catch (ABC) limit recommended by the Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee (SSC), compared to the 2024 ABC.  Advisors didn’t understand the need for a decrease in the catch limit when the most recent assessment shows biomass at 219% of the target level.”

It seems that most of the advisors could compare the 2024 and 2025 ABCs, but comparing the differing biomass estimates in the operational and management track assessments was something that they could not, did not, or perhaps just did not want to do, for if they had made such comparison, understanding why the ABC was reduced shouldn’t have been that hard.

One advisor, perhaps more creative than the rest, who accepted the 219% figure but not the SSCs conclusions,

“questioned what it would take of the SSC to use a different model and liberalize the ABC for a few years,”

a request not too different from asking a referee to change the rules of a game because someone did not like the score—although he certainly liked that 219%.

But most of the Advisory Panel are, in some way, connected to the recreational fishing industry, and are sharply focused on how management measures might impact their income in the short term, so their willful blindness to the entirety of the management track assessment, and their focus on a single data point, isn’t too hard to understand.

The reaction of the Monitoring Committee was a little more puzzling, for all are professional fisheries managers who are fully capable of reading and understanding the assessment. Yet, if anything, the Monitoring Committee’s response to the SSC’s recommendation was more extreme than that of the Advisory Panel, with six individuals expressing strong reservations about the advice, and four of those refusing to endorse the recommendation.

Once again, most of the focus was on the “219%.”  The summary of the Monitoring Committee’s August 1 meeting noted that

“The four MC members who could not endorse the 2025 ABC said a decrease in the ABC is not justifiable given that the biomass is so far above the target level.”

The fact that the estimated size of the biomass had been reduced by 20 percent between the 2021 operational assessment and the 2024 management track assessment did not seem to enter their considerations at all.  Instead, they focused on projected future declines in the biomass, which they arguably had good cause to question, instead of acknowledging that the black sea bass stock was substantially smaller than they believed one year ago.

The report noted that

“One MC member noted that the projections are based at fishing at [the fishing mortality rate that would produce maximum sustainable yield].  The current management requirements do not allow a large amount of biomass to be removed from the population all at once to help bring highly abundant stocks down to their target level.”

It was a curious comment, given that over the past ten years, the recreational sector has exceeded its annualcatch limit in every year but 2019, that combined recreational and commercialcatch exceeded the ABC in every one of those years except for 2022, and thatthe stock experienced overfishing in 2021, when the overall catch was 21percent above the Overfishing Limit.

Given numbers like that, it would seem that “a large amount of biomass [is] removed from the population” just about every year, and that such removals are not much below—and, in 2021, were over—the level of catch that would equal the maximum sustainable yield from the fishery.

But, once again, such considerations were eclipsed by the focus on “219%.”

And in the end, that focus determined the outcome of an important vote, with the Management Board voting to ignore the SSC’s advice (which is binding on the Council, but not the ASMFC), and making no reductions to the ABC, the ACLs, the Recreational Harvest Limit or the commercial quota.

Worse, by carrying over the 2024 specifications into the 2025 season, without taking account of the management track assessment’s reduced estimate of spawning stock biomass, the management board set an ABC of 7,557 metric tons.  That ABC is 22 percent above the overfishing limit established by the management track stock assessment.

Thus, assuming that the recreational and commercial sectors' catch is anywhere close to their sector ACLs—and, remember, the recreational sector has exceeded its ACL in nine out of the last 10 years—the management board’s actions make it virtually certain that the black sea bass stock will experience overfishing in 2025, and that federal fisheries managers will have to adopt even more restrictive measures for the 2026 season.

But maybe no one cares.

After all, the spawning stock biomass is 219 percent above target.

For now.